Peace processes are often plagued by uncertainty, especially when conflicts are protracted and the intentions, will and ability of each party to honor any agreement remain unclear. And the significant political costs associated with making concessions to a mortal enemy often doom negotiations before any agreement is reached.
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This is quite evident in the recently declassified protocols of the 1993 Israeli cabinet meeting that approved the first Oslo Accord with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The minutes reveal that the signs of eventual failure were evident from the beginning.
At the time, Israeli Prime Minister Isaac Rabin hoped that PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat could stop the rise of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and help quell the intifada that had ravaged the West Bank and Gaza since 1987. But Arafat, Wary of being perceived as a ‘collaborator’, he refused to become Israel’s security subcontractor.
Rabin’s fatalistic Foreign Minister Shimon Peres warned that “the whole PLO thing” could ‘fall apart’, giving way to an ‘Iran-like Hamas’. Meanwhile, Israeli Armed Forces Chief of Staff Ehud Barak made his famous comment that the deal had “more holes than Swiss cheese.”
Peres was one of the founders of the State of Israel and promoter of the Oslo agreements that were to pave the way to peace with the Palestinians. Reuters
A big step
In any case, the 1993 agreement represented a historic step, symbolizing the mutual recognition of national movements that had been fighting for control of the same territory for more than a century. It also served as a transitional agreement that established Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and the parts of the West Bank occupied by Israel since 1967. And it provided a road map to address core issues of the conflict, such as borders, the status of Jerusalem and the refugee drama. who fled their homes during the 1948 war.
Unfortunately, 30 years after it was signed and 29 years after Rabin, Peres and Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Oslo process is largely remembered as a paradigmatic example of diplomatic deception. The creation of an independent Palestinian state has been made unviable by Israel’s land grab and settlement expansion: between 1993 and the present, the number of Israeli settlers has grown from 115,000 to nearly 700,000. The entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is now effectively a single state in which segregated Palestinians are systematically denied fundamental human rights.
In Jerusalem, whose eastern neighborhoods had once been conceived as the future capital of Palestine, Israeli control has been extended: from 40 km² in 1967 to around 130 km² today. In this densely populated city, Jews and Arabs live under separate legal systems. And while an independent Palestinian state remains the preferred solution among international actors, this possibility increasingly seems like a pipe dream.
To be sure, the Oslo Accords were not so much the realization of a political vision as the product of desperation. Rabin took the previously unthinkable step of shaking hands with Arafat only after failing to reach a peace deal with Syrian ruler Hafez al-Assad. And he knew that the political costs of negotiating two peace processes at the same time would be unacceptable.
Arafat, for his part, was as desperate as his Israeli counterparts. The Palestinian leader miscalculated the geopolitical implications of the end of the Cold War. His support for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 alienated him from his wealthy Gulf patrons, causing the bankruptcy of the PLO and its international isolation. Arafat’s strategic miscalculations were reminiscent of the colossal mistake of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who sided with Nazi Germany in World War II.
![Yasser Arafat](https://www.eltiempo.com/files/article_content_new/uploads/2018/03/06/5a9ebb03b425f.jpeg)
Furthermore, the first Intifada, the most intense Palestinian uprising since the creation of the PLO, was neither initiated nor led by that organization. Arafat desperately needed to reassert control over the Palestinian national movement and was determined to establish a presence in the occupied territories at any cost. This vulnerability explains why the PLO was willing to accept minor military bases in Gaza and the West Bank without receiving assurances that Palestinians would be able to exercise their right to self-determination. What was agreed in Oslo did not even include an Israeli commitment to stop the expansion of settlements, much less to dismantle them.
Against this backdrop, the post-Oslo years saw a vicious cycle of Palestinian terrorism and Israeli retaliation. Palestinians suffered collective punishment, economic decline, and the expansion of Israeli settlements, a trend that persisted even under Rabin. When he was assassinated in November 1995 by a Jewish extremist who viewed him as a traitor for “selling the Land of Israel” (Eretz-Israel), he was already politically weakened by a series of devastating suicide attacks.
The Oslo process sowed the seeds of its own destruction by maintaining a “constructive ambiguity” about the nature of the final settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The agreements were complicated, full of loopholes and reflected the power imbalance between occupiers and occupied, and generated expectations destined to clash with conflicting national narratives and domestic political considerations.
lost effort
By the time negotiations on a final peace agreement began, no Israeli peace proposal – not even the very comprehensive ones put forward by Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, in 2000 and 2008, respectively – could satisfy unrealistic Palestinian expectations. Furthermore, by exceeding the limits of the Israelis’ ability to compromise on a deal, these proposals and their subsequent rejection set the stage for the rise of Israel’s annexationist far-right, of which Prime Minister Benjamin’s current proto-fascist coalition is Netanyahu.
The Abraham Accords of 2020, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab countries – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – are a testament to the failure of the Oslo Accords. During the Oslo era, the idea prevailed that peace with the Palestinians would serve as a springboard for peace between Israel and the Arab world at large. But ultimately, geopolitical considerations prevailed, and to the point that Israel and Saudi Arabia appear to be moving closer to diplomatic normalization. Meanwhile, as the Arab-Israeli conflict increasingly looks like a relic of the past, Palestine remains occupied.
![LOOP](https://www.eltiempo.com/files/article_content_new/uploads/2021/04/24/6084392a6b321.jpeg)
Palestinians shout slogans in support of the Al-Aqsa mosque during a rally in Gaza City.
The United States, as the primary architect of the Abraham Accords, must take advantage of this regional realignment to mitigate the mistreatment of Palestinians. Any normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia should be conditional on significant progress on the Palestinian front. But a deal that fails to help dissolve Netanyahu’s coalition of messianic settlers and settlement fanatics would be merely a cosmetic adjustment orchestrated by a shrewd political strategist.
SHLOMO BEN-AMI*
© PROJECT SYNDICATE
TEL AVIV
*Former foreign minister of Israel. He is the author of ‘Prophets Without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution.’ Oxford University Press, 2022.
A symbol of what was not
Five floors, solid sandy stone, imposing structure and majestic views of the Esplanade of the Mosques of Jerusalem. Thus, in the nineties, a building was erected in the West Bank town of Abu Dis that was going to be the Palestinian Parliament.
The construction was left unfinished and abandoned, and embodies the failure of a State project that never materialized. “Here is Parliament. It was left for the cats and dogs,” says Atef Erekat, manager of the Abu Dis City Council and a resident of the area, sarcastically, while contemplating the skeleton of the building that began to be built in 1996 to be the Palestinian Chamber.
![Israel and Palestine](https://www.eltiempo.com/files/article_content_new/uploads/2023/07/14/64b1b6be7a057.jpeg)
The war between Israel and Palestine began on May 14, 1948.
These were times when there was still optimism: the Oslo Accords had been signed the previous years, and the newly created Palestinian National Authority (PNA) still had hope of reaching a final pact with Israel to create its own Palestinian state.
But three decades later, this longing that the Palestinians saw nearby is a distant mirage, and this building that had the pretense of Parliament seems to illustrate it: dirt, dust and pigeon droppings permeate its interior, in the plenary room there is a worn mattress that must have use some tramp, you see animal bones and even the almost decomposed body of a dog.
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“No one has ever used this building, it is a huge, almost empty place,” laments Luai Erekat, a bricklayer and resident of Abu Dis, who shows Efe the interior of the building, where part of it is used as a warehouse for Al Quds University, one of the large academic centers of the West Bank, which has its main campus nearby.
Almost 30 years ago, people in Abu Dis “were very happy about the fact that the House was built in the village, leaders from all over the world would come, but this never came true,” laments Erekat.
The failed Parliament – whose construction cost nearly four million dollars – was not only left unfinished, but also isolated and relegated behind the separation wall that Israel built in 2002, and which looks imposing from a few meters away. The barrier runs like a scar through the occupied Palestinian territories and winds through the mountains of Abu Dis itself, a town of about 12,000 inhabitants that was divided by the wall and lost its direct access to Jerusalem.
EFE
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